http://mobenta.com/news/shownews-2150.html
The Brazilian fifth edition of Big Brother isn’t only on TV screens throughout the country: you can download it and play it on your own cell phone. My Big Brother is the latest game produced by Meantime Games, a C.E.S.A.R (Center for Advanced Studies and Systems of Recife) spin off company. It turns the HouseGuests into characters and allows the player to choose one of them to take care of by feeding it and keeping it clean and satisfied. Users of the main wireless carriers can download My Big Brother for free since January. In addition, you need to buy a pack of credits to start playing.
The game is built over a client-server system, and interacts with the TV show in real-time. So, if the character you chose turns out to be evicted, you’ll need to restart all over again. In the other hand, you get extra credits every time your character wins the Head of Household Competition in real life, for instance. Since it’s an interactive game, every event that happens in the TV show affects on your character mood. About 45 mobiles devices are compatible with the title.
My Big Brother is only one of the 30 games developed by Meantime since its creation, in 2001. The company has a growing team of about 40 professionals, including programmers, artists, designers and producers. Its titles are compatible with J2ME and BREW, and have been distributed worldwide by top publishers and operators in the US, Brazil and Asia. Meantime works with a full-featured server platform for mobile, which allows carriers, publishers and developers to have access to usage statistics, content download and upload, instant messaging, high-scores and online tournaments.
The feature is a joint project of Meantime Games and Globo.com, the internet portal owned by Rede Globo, Brazilian main TV network. After a few months of negotiation, Globo has contacted Meantime to close the deal for the development. “We’ve selected ten people of our team to work with the game, and after three months the game was ready to role, including the testing level, so the users wouldn’t find any flaws playing it”, explains Haim Mesel, Meantime’s CEO.
“The player can answer quizzes, buy new credits and other interactivities, all through your cell phone. It is surely the most advanced Java-based application in the Brazilian market”, reveals Sergio Berson, Globo.com’s mobile technology manager. “The game has an entirely new concept, an unseen model, and is based on a business format never tested before”, adds Henrique Oilifiers, Globo.com’s games coordinator and creator of the project.
My Big Brother came to match up with one of the most successful and viewed TV shows in the country. Since its first edition, four years ago, Big Brother Brazil has been a national craze, with highs of more than 60% of audience. Every week, some 30 million votes are cast by the viewers via phone, SMS or internet, to decide which HouseGuest will be evicted.
